Manga

How to spell manga

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce manga

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does manga mean?

1. nounA style of Japanese comic books and graphic novels, or an individual work in that style.

Manga in a sentence

• She spent her train ride reading a manga about a young chef.

• The bookshop devoted an entire shelf to manga translated from Japanese.

Where does manga come from?

Language of origin: Japanese

Manga comes directly from Japanese, where it is written 漫画 and combines man, meaning 'whimsical', 'impromptu', or 'rambling', with ga, meaning 'picture' or 'drawing'; the literal sense is something like 'free-flowing sketches'. The compound was popularised in the early nineteenth century, most famously by the woodblock artist Katsushika Hokusai, whose sketchbooks were published under the title Hokusai Manga and gathered hundreds of casual drawings. The word entered English in the later twentieth century as Japanese comic books and graphic novels gained an international following, and it kept its original spelling unchanged. Because English borrowed it whole rather than reshaping it, there are no Latin or French sound shifts to trip over; the only real trap is remembering the unstressed 'a' at the end rather than writing it as 'manger' or 'mangar'. It stays the same in singular and plural, much like other Japanese loans such as sushi and karaoke.

How the word is built

• man (whimsical, rambling)
• ga (picture, drawing), from Japanese 漫画